just that fraction of an inch shift, where people who are working three jobs to not quite take care of their families wake up one morning and get hit on the head by an apple and all of a sudden it occurs to them that hey - those guys +are+ the spoiled rich elite with expensive educations who have contempt for us - and all of this is going to rain down on them like a short sharp shower.

i think that game where you get your heart cut out is the one the ancient aztecs played. what senator frist is unaware of, perhaps, is that in that game, it was the winners who got sacrificed, as it was deemed the greatest honor possible. i'd be happy to oblige, i've got quite a collection of extremely dull steak knives in my kitchen drawer.

I like the fact that (according to the NY Times, where the quote comes from) he said it "unprompted, at the end of a recent interview." Like he'd just come up with it the night before, and wanted to stick it into the conversation even though it had nothing to do with anything.

Though I really shouldn't trust the article without the full text of the interview.

Nothing like an out of context quote for a little "red meat". It does contrast nicely with last weeks "Iraq is a quagmire... our mission in Iraq is doomed to failure... It's all Bush's fault, etc." speech from Senator Ted Kennedy.

Isn't harping on Frist's comment just a bit petty? Last week over 8 million Iraqi's got the chance to vote for the candidate of their choice for first time in their lives. You wouldn't know it happend from looking at this and other progressive, left-leaning web sites.

You don't have to jump on the Bush bandwagon to admit that democracy in Iraq is a GOOD THING!

I also think that the fact that the insurgents in Iraq are desperate enough to start kidnapping G.I. Joe dolls is pretty damn funny!

Next week: Senator Frist refers to his gung-ho style of leadership as "personal organ operations" and "extraordinary negotiation". The next day, the New York Times calls Republican politics "loveball".

Ray, in your quest to take the shit-stirring gold, you forgot to start your post with "What you people don't realize..." and you forgot to call Patrick "partisan" (it's a very important form element). I can only give you a 7.75. The judge from Albania gives you an 8, though.

You wouldn't know it happend from looking at this and other progressive, left-leaning web sites.

Actually, you would. You'd just have to look at actual websites, on the actual web, rather than the magic strawman fantasy diorama no one but youself and the readers of Powerline can see.

You don't have to jump on the Bush bandwagon to admit that democracy in Iraq is a GOOD THING!

What happened in Iraq wasn't democracy by a long shot. Many of the people who got to vote had no idea what the people they were voting for or against stood for. There's this little thing called a free press that is necessary for a democracy to function. Not to mention pretty much universal education so that folks can actually read that free press.

Then of course, there's the issue of who got to vote. As I understand it large parts of the Sunni dominated areas didn't get to vote. Just how is that democracy?

Actually, you would. You'd just have to look at actual websites, on the actual web, rather than the magic strawman fantasy diorama no one but youself and the readers of Powerline can see.

I'm sure that he's just reading one of the other internets that President Junior told us about.

Sure, it's great that Iraqis got to vote for members of a constitutional convention. That, however, is not a sufficient result to justify the amount of death and destruction that has been rained down upon them in Junior's ill-conceived invasion to seize Saddam's non-existant WMD.

They are counting the ballots in secret. How do we know they will get them counted accurately? How do we know they didn't vote for who they wanted to in all those other elections where Saddam "won". Why should we trust this election any more than we trusted those?

Thanks for the kind words... it's obviously a friendly place around here for those who march to a slightly different drummer...

I read about as many lefty blogs as I read righty blogs and there's not been much mention at the lefty blogs I read about the Iraq election... lets take inventory: Here at Electrolite: no mention... BoingBoing: no mention... OliverWillis: a mention, but nothing that I would call serious commentary...

The two righty blogs blogs I read regularly, instapundit and lileks.com have discussed the issue nominally as expected for their respective sites.

The fact that people here are actually arguing about the validity of this election versus previous elections where the only person on the ballot was Saddam Hussein; worries about accurate counts; and not trusting the election makes me shake my head in sadness.

Finally Beth, for your information, I get my information from the same Internet that you get your information from. The only problem with that is that we both get our information from the same Internet that Dan Rather gets his Texas Air National Guard documents from, and we all know how reliable Dan Rather and CBS News is these days... Powerline... isn't that the blog that won Newsweek's blog of the year award? I'll have to check them out...

The fact that people here are actually arguing about the validity of this election versus previous elections where the only person on the ballot was Saddam Hussein...

Nobody brought up previous elections. An election can be less than valid on its own without referral to other invalid elections. A small hint of progress does not necessarily excuse the methods used to obtain it.

Thanks for the kind words... it's obviously a friendly place around here for those who march to a slightly different drummer...

Oh give me a break. You're the one who walked in proclaiming that Patrick's one-sentence dig at Bill First must of course mean that he spits on the fundamental human rights and dignities of the Iraqi people. If you want to strut around wagging fingers and citing freeper boilerplate, you should be able to take a few wags and pokes in return without trying to play the "Woe is me, I am but a humble, civil traveler in strange liberal blogs" card.

The fact that people here are actually arguing about the validity of this election versus previous elections where the only person on the ballot was Saddam Hussein;

Nobody is "arguing about" this point. One person has mentioned it so far. Once.

worries about accurate counts; and not trusting the election makes me shake my head in sadness.

So, respectfully, you're either being incredibly naive or you're putting on a standard-issue Gosh, aren't you liberal folks such cute little conspiracy theorists! song-and-dance number. Heaven forfend that we should worry for the actual substance of democracy when the show is so fantastic!

I read about as many lefty blogs as I read righty blogs and there's not been much mention at the lefty blogs I read about the Iraq election... lets take inventory: Here at Electrolite: no mention... BoingBoing: no mention... OliverWillis: a mention, but nothing that I would call serious commentary...

So you read three "lefty" blogs? One of which is a multi-writer clearinghouse of all sorts of crazy and interesting stuff (BoingBoing) and one of which is the intermittent (and only intermittently political) personal blog of our host here? I don't read Oliver Willis, so I have no comment there. But two out of your three don't exactly post a sign saying "We will cover geopolitical events as they happen!" So why should you be shocked that they don't necessarily cover geopolitical events as they happen?

Eschaton, Daily Kos, World O'Crap, TalkLeft, Tapped, Talking Points Memo, Altercation, This Modern World, Political Animal, Kicking Ass... ever heard of 'em? Try a google search for "top liberal blogs" or "best liberal blogs" or just scroll through Eschaton's links, or Kos' links. They discussed the Iraqi elections six ways from Sunday.

You don't have to like them.

You don't have to agree with them.

You just don't get to run around pretending that whatever little selection of "lefty" blogs you read is representative of that side of the political spectrum.

If I'm irate, I'm not sorry. You seem to be trying to be civil, for which I give you credit and thanks, but you're trying to foist two major right-wing trademark Acts of Condescension on us here:

A. The insistence that "liberal bloggers" have a duty or a need to blog about {insert topic here} on your schedule. Often coupled to an incomplete (in your case) or deliberately cherry-picked (all too otherwise common) understanding of just what the "liberal blogosphere" is. This seems to happen every time there's a new suicide bombing, or a terrorist or insurgent kills a hostage... we get a torrent of posts by self-described righty bloggers. "Gosh, why aren't all the liberals condemning {insert atrocity here}?"

Because, of course, we should have to jump through hoops on command to reaffirm that beheading people is wrong, and executing hostages is a bad thing, and that suicide bombers are bad people.

And of course, it's right-wing bloggers to whom we owe this trained-seal show of moral affirmation!

Can you see why this attitude might grate after a (very short) while? I'm willing to give you the benefit of the doubt and presume that you thought you were bringing a new point to the table. But you're most emphatically not.

B. The insistence that qualms about the recent Iraqi elections are tantamount to cynical disrespect for the courage/dignity/aspirations (insert your phrase of choice) of the Iraqi voters themselves. Which is, let's call a spade a spade here, phantasmagorical bullshit.

My personal attitude (one which is pretty much plastered across every lefty/progressive blog I listed above) is as follows:

1. I'm amazed at the courage of the Iraqis who did turn out in such numbers, despite the threats they were facing. This is a good thing-- nay, an awesome thing.

2. Despite this, it doesn't mean much if the election fails to eventually seat a stable, representative, and genuinely sovereign Iraqi government that can deal reliably with the hideous security problems Iraq now faces without the presence of 150,000 U.S. troops to do all the work for it.

3. A deep distrust for the Bush administration and its dancing menagerie of fuck-ups and spin-jobs in no way equates to disrespect for the Iraqi people, or ill-wishes for their future. As has been pointed out, the courage of the Iraqi voters isn't the property of anyone over here. Neither is hope for their future. Where we disagree is on the fitness of the Bush administration to leave Iraq a better place than it was found, and to do right by the hundreds of thousands of Americans tasked with rolling this boulder up a hill at great personal risk.

For the record I didn't question the validity of the election in terms of previous elections. I question the validity of the election on its own terms.

Patrick: If T doesn't want to disemvowel him, can I have him? Not the posts, him. This surgery and its aftermath have given me new and creative ideas on -- what's that you say? But hey, Mr. Gonzales says it's ok and he's got all that education and stuff...

I liked Scott Lynch's first comment best. The trouble with a lot of the subsequent responses is that several of you have let this guy maneuver you into sounding huffy, which is exactly what he wants out of you.

What the Ray Ciscons of the world realize is that political discourse in the brave new world is all about combat, not information. Responding with facts is pointless. They don't care about facts. You can be right on the facts until you're blue in the face, but you're not going to deter these people until you master the same rhetorical techniques of measured brutality to which they've given a generation of study.

At one time, there were sidebar adverts in Smithsonian for reproductions of Preston Brooks's cane. As I recall, they were available with and without "Hit him again" plaques. (To be clear, these were third-party ads; the Institution was not itself producing or selling them.) I haven't seen the ads in a long time, though I imagine that the product is still available.

"...Conservatism is the most powerful and electric force in the American intellectual landscape. Young people no longer discover the left and get excited; they are far more likely to get their intellectual kicks discovering and experimenting with conservatism. But what exactly do conservatives believe? How do they resolve the seeming paradox that so many conservatives revere the past yet are also progressives, determined to move this nation forward and let it grow, stretch, and inhabit more and more of its own best self? Disraeli produced a definition of conservatism that resolves the problem. It is so terse and compelling, it ranks as a milestone of political thought...."

My father is a 2nd generation Wall Street Conservative Republican. He refused to vote for George W. Bush. The terms such as "Conservative" are being twisted in our day to less-than-meaninglessness.

Barbara Boxer is the one senator whose name comes up again and again in the rear-guard action against the Republican Absolute Victory Over Everything and Everybody Forever. She protested the Ohio vote and did not vote to accept it: she's been asking the hard questions in the confirmation hearings.

She's also the only senator I know of to say "I accepted the election in 2001, and that was wrong."

Is there a reason I can't get my name and email address to save anymore? DIdn't there used to be a button that would allow me to be remembered? Is it part of the effort against comment spam?

I was about to say I wasn't finding the check box where it used to be at the bottom of the screen right above the preview button, but this time it's there and even though I could have sworn I knew where to look and I looked there, I am forced to conclude that I was just missing it.

I don't know what to think about the right candidate for next time. But any kind of support for the Democrats with integrity has got to be helpful. I've duly bookmarked the Boxer blog.

Thanks very much for mentioning President Boxer. In launching it, I had some important secondary goals (in addition to showing support for Sen. Boxer): To highlight other examples of Democratic courage, to hold Democratic lawmakers accountable, and to let them know that (1) they need to have a spine and (2) there's support for Democrats who courageously stand their ground on liberal issues.

It does seem that others of the Democratic leadership (more if Dean makes it) don't see gun grabbing as a winning liberal issue or particularly desirable or both so Boxer does deserve full credit for a steadfast gun grabbing position.

There are several issues on which I seriously disagree with Barbara Boxer. However, I admire her tenacity and on a whole bunch of really, really pertinent issues right now, she's been dead right.

One of the several things that has led to the Right's current dominance is that liberals and liberal-libertarians are all too willing to be distracted by elementary wedge-issue rhetorical tactics. As an exercise in learning to stop falling for this stuff, we will not be having a gun debate in this thread. Period.

I tell my Liberal friends that I'm proud that Barbara Boxer is my Senator. I tell my Centrist friends that I'm proud that Dianne Feinstein is my Senator. True, in both cases. Feinstein praised Condi Rice; Boxer grilled her. But, more important in this "Boxer for President" subthread, after Bush and Kerry, Barbara Boxer received the 3rd largest number of votes of any American for any office this past Election Day. In this case, I feel that Every Vote Counts.

Hm. I'm not particularly proud of having Feinstein as my Senator. I don't loathe her, but I also haven't seen much sign that she's unusually distinguished, unusually courageous, unusually eloquent, or unusually effective. She seems like a pretty ordinary moderate-to-conservative Democrat.

Which isn't to suggest, mind you, that I have any plans to vote against her, ever. I don't expect her to have a primary challenger, and I would vote for her over any conceivable Republican opponent. (I can explain why I think that's rational if people want, but I imagine the explanation will be familiar to most people here.)

Seeing as there seems to be a number of CA'ans on this thread, here's a question about CA politics (from someone on the East Coast):
Enron led to CA blackouts and that was one of the reason's for Gov Davis' recall election, right? There's been a lot about of press after that that Enron basically created the energy crisis on purpose. Is there any local feeling that Davis was targeted by Enron?

I wish somebody'd give me a person to vote for instead of Feinstein. She's way too bought, and always has been -- her intimacy with the interests which gouged San Francisco in the last generation is way too thorough.

But once in a while, she does something decent. She can't be relied on to do the right thing, but she can't be relied on to do the wrong thing either.

I also get Sam Farr as a representative, and you could do a lot worse than that (not that he's perfect).

mayakda - I think the press would have to make the connection explicitly, and that isn't gonna happen. Especially since Hearst bought the Chron. I don't think anything is going to be able to redeem Gray - a politician worthy of his given name.

Besides, at this point there's no getting back what Enron stole from the people of California. If the media is going to point any fingers, they should be pointed straight at Bush's appointees at the FERC who allowed the whole fiasco to happen unchecked.

Yep, the liberal media (Viacom, GE, Disney, Time Warner and News Corp) are gonna be all over this.

mayakda, I don't think that there's a sense that Enron's gouging of California was in order to stop Davis's career. I think we think Enron did it to make money. I don't think Davis was any kind of impediment to them except a little bit way at the end when he suddenly got the bright idea that it might be good to hold Enron responsible for their actions.

I am restraining myself from digressing into the Litany of Enron -- just contemplating those bastards actually laughing while Southern California burned makes me want to scream.

Clark, when you decide which politicians to support, do you use only one measure?

I think that Enron was in it for the money. I have a friend who personally lost $2,000,000 out of pocket from being dicked around by Enron for 2 years while his company got Swiss Bankers and so forth to sign on for a powerplant in the Philippines that would burn rice husks. Enron finally did not sign on the dotted line, after 2 years of many persons' salary was expended, saying that they had decided to get out of energy generation and just be involved in marketing the distribution of energy.

It did not help Gray Davis that he was right about Enron. It happened on his watch.

Lucy Kemnitzer:

You express the majority position of California Democrats with "I wish somebody'd give me a person to vote for instead of Feinstein..." This morning I heard that her war chest has $2,800,000 so far, hence she is far ahead of any likely Republican candidate in the 2006 elections. This is about as close to a "safe seat" in the Senate, especially as Barbara Boxer was perceived by GOP as more vulnerable than Feinstein. To say that Feinstein is "bought" is hard to disentangle from "husband is a rich lawyer" and the like.

What matters to me is the 2006 elections, under Dean as Dem kingmaker, and how they set up the 2008 elections. Or am I looking too far ahead? I mean, while not wearing my official Futurist hat and Science Fiction author hat at the same time?

Enron was only partially responsible for the California electricity crisis. El Paso Natural Gas was in there, as was Reliant, and several other companies. It was ripoff season, and there was a feeding frenzy.

If you go further back to the origins of the crisis, PG&E and Southern Cal Edison desperately wanted deregulation so they could swap their plants with ones in other states that were not under the regulation of the California Public Utilities Commission. Every big business in California wanted deregulation because the conventional wisdom was that the state had massive power generation over-capacity (due to those socialist over-regulators at the PUC), and the big boys wanted to ensure that most of the inevitable price cuts would flow to them instead of residential customers. The Republicans in the legislature, being a wholly-owned subsidiary of big business, and also suffering from a weird form of brain damage that makes them incapable of seeing the value of the government they serve in, were for deregulation in spades. The Democrats deserve some blame for going along with the deregulation madness, but the Republicans and their allies are the ones that own it. The complexity of the partially deregulated system was not a bug, as the Republican revisionists now say, it was a feature.

During the height of the crisis, Bush and Cheney conspicuously stood by and claimed that nothing could be or needed to be done. They were wrong, of course, because massive fraud was occurring. All it would have taken was a phone call from the top, and a few injunctions, and the party would have been over. The Republicans in the California legislature meanwhile did everything they could to confuse the issue and to interfere with Davis' work to make new deals that would keep the lights and the air conditioners on. I don't believe that the Republican legislators were really in favor of massive fraud, but alternative was admitting that they were idiots who screwed up big, and that their party leaders were crooks. That would have been political suicide, so their only choice was to make the problem worse, deny everything, starting with reality, and to try to find someone else to blame.

So yes, I think the campaign against Davis had everything to do with Enron, but it was "Enron" the movement, not just the one company. We don't know what happened in Schwarzenegger's meeting with Ken Lay before his run, so I don't want to make too much of it. The dynamic behind the recall was much bigger than one ambitious politician or one slimy company.

"What matters to me is the 2006 elections, under Dean as Dem kingmaker"

Anyone who thinks the chairman of the DNC is a "kingmaker" has a somewhat exaggerated view of that office's powers. Dean will have plenty of clout, but nowhere near enough to, for instance, propose and dispose who gets big-state Senatorial nominations.

The DNC chair has a lot more influence in broad strategic and tactical matters. Strategic: Should the the party be fielding candidates even in extremely long-shot contests? (Dean has tended to argue that it should.) Tactical: In the final weeks before an election, to which states and districts should national-party funds be directed? Lots more of that than of "kingmaking."

mayakda, I think you have an exaggerated view of how important Gray Davis has ever been. -- I voted for him, and I voted to retain him, but he wasn't a cutting-edge Democrat whose tenure in the governor's seat would make or break Republican hopes in California.

As others have pointed out deregulation was the big issue, and Gray Davis didn't oppose it particularly -- few of the major politicians in California opposed it much, for the simple, straightforward reason that the big money people wanted it.

Deregulation is another of those ideas pushed in the name of liberty and freedom of choice, whose real content is "let the capitalists do what they want with no limit, no protection for their victims[oops, customers and workers]and no obligation."

The puzzle to me has been why bother to have a recall when the governor's term is so short. I think it's because, as usual, the Republicans didn't trust the democratic process to give them all the marbles in a regular election, and seeing an opening, where they could ride a twin wave of xenophobia over the drivers license issue* and real honest to goodness unfocussed righteous rage over the real physical harm done to the state by the energy crisis, simply took advantage of it.

*The history of the drivers license issue is this. Formerly getting a drivers license in California was very easy and simple. Anybody could do it, regardless of citizenship, and with very little in the way of paperwork. The defenders of individual liberty pushed to have the ability to get a drivers license taken away from anybody but citizens and permanent residents. This was obviously unworkable -- given the lousy state of public transportation in the areas where the largest numbers of legal and illegal immigrants and migrants work, the largest economy in the United States would grind to a halt if it could be effectively enforced. So under Gray Davis, the law was to be ammended so that anybody with an armful of documents to prove their identity could get a license. This was not sufficiently evil-minded and xenophobic for the demagogues. So the upshot is that Gray Davis lost his job, we got a cartoon character for governor who wants to be the supreme leader of a facist state, and we have a lot of unlicensed, uninsured drivers dodging the cops.

Why yes, I seem to be kind of emotional this morning. I don't have time to go back and fix this so that it's more wise and moderate, so could we pretend I haven't been ranting, but expressing myself in reasonable terms? I promise the content would be the same if I were cooler headed, just the words would be better thought out.

So, I guess what I mean to say is there have been conspiracies during all this, but Gray Davis was never the focus, just a side effect.

Hearing that ARnold wants to redistrict (is he still pushing for that) fuels that a bit.

Arnold wants to permanently move the responsibility for redistricting over to a non-partisan panel of experts, rather than the legislature. I happen to believe that this is a necessary step to preserving our republic. It is the very opposite of the Tom DeLay brand of gerrymandering. In the short run, it may be bad for Democrats in California (although that's unclear), but in the long term it will mean more competitive districts and more moderate representatives.

It's also good, I think, to have a major lever of power removed from the state Legislature. In Massachusetts - which is heavily gerrymandered despite there being little chance the Republicans could elect more than a single representative even given optimal conditions - the former Speaker of the (state) House used redistricting to punish members of the Congressional delegation as well as other state legislators.

Burning Question of the Day: Can one play hardball by using a meat ax to cut people’s hearts out?

7 Feb 2005:
WASHINGTON (AP) — Vice President Dick Cheney said Sunday the budget going to Congress this week was not prepared with a “meat ax,” but that the administration found roughly 150 federal programs it believed can be cut or eliminated.
“We are being tight,” Cheney said. “This is the tightest budget that has been submitted since we got here.”

“It’s not something we’ve done with a meat ax, nor are we suddenly turning our back on the most needy people in our society,” Cheney told “Fox News Sunday.”

I work at So. Calif. Edison and was working there when the crisis happened. I don't know if this is true, but I was told by several people whose opinions I respect that Edison did NOT want deregulation but saw that it was going to happen, so they went along with it trying to get the most they could out of it. I was also told that PG&E was the real culprit, but as everyone I have ever talked to at Edison thinks that PG&E = Satan, I don't know how many grains of salt to take that statement with.

You can be right on the facts until you're blue in the face, but you're not going to deter these people until you master the same rhetorical techniques of measured brutality to which they've given a generation of study.

So, how do we master these techniques? Is mastering them a matter of learning to defeat them, or of learning to use rhetorical measured brutality too?

Perhaps Patrick is hinting that we need to master rhetorical measured brutality which cuts people's heart's out, without using a meat ax, while playing hardball? That requires the rhetorical use of "framing" -- which is the hardball equivalent of a "curve ball." Or, in the case of the test match world, a googly.

I have to agree with him that America is not in "The Early Days of a Better Nation."

So, what about Parliament considering the rehabilitation of the reputation of King Macbeth, on his 1000th birthday? Is that now on the SNP agenda?

PG&E isn't Satan, they just wish they could be. I don't know about the gold rush days, but for decades PG&E operated in a regulated environment where the major policy decisions were made for them by the PUC: how much capacity they had to build, where it would be, and how much they could charge for it. The executives chafed under these restrictions. They yearned for the opportunity to call the shots and show how they could play with the big boys. They finally got their chance, and we know how it worked out. This is very similar to the S&L debacle, where the executives had plenty of ego and no clue as to how much they'd been protected from the con men and the hustlers.

Actually, PG&E management got off easier than most. They moved their assets to an out of state shell parent company and had the old in-state company declare bankruptcy. The PUC could try to go after them, but the old in-state PG&E has empty pockets so there's not much point, and I think that so far the federal courts have protected the getaway corporation.

So-Cal Ed. did not declare bankruptcy, even though it was really under just as much financial pressure as PG&E. That is a pretty significant difference in behavior.

In context, a lot of people went along with the deregulation boondoggle at the beginning. I voted for it; it seemed to be the way things were going. But that was in Pete Wilson's administration.

Davis was smeared. The only real basis for the smear is that the state and all of us in it were robbed on his watch. But we know who the robbers were, and we know who let them in, and we know who protected them while they did their dirty work. Funny how all of them happen to be Republicans.

Seriously, in response to Ken's serious question, I think that mastering the brutality doesn't mean we have to be brutal. If someone posting comments is not doing so in good faith, it doesn't help to pretend we're having a nice civilized debate with them. The equivalent in realspace would be someone coming to a meeting in order to pick a fight. That's brutal by any standard. Showing them the door isn't brutal, it's just necessary. We don't need to be rough or mean about it, just firm.

Whoops, sorry to post twice in a day, but just after I replied to Ken MacLeod, I finally read yesterday's (Tuesday 8 Feb 2005) New York Times op ed page and saw:

"Spearing the Beast"
by
Paul Krugman

"Social Security is the soft underbelly of the welfare state," declares Stephen Moore of the Club for Growth and the Cato Institute. "If you jab your spear through that, you can undermine the whole welfare state."

[perhaps the same spear that the centurion used at Golgotha?]

Also, thanks, TomB and Temperance, for the insights into Deregulation of electricity in California. I'm still so outraged (and out-of-pocket) that I appreciate such thoughtful analysis. I look back to my days with Boeing in Washington State, paying tiny bills for cheap hydropower, with increasing nostalgia.

Jonathan, I don't know much about the SNP's agenda, and only glanced at the news about Macbeth's 'rehabilitation'. My admittedly vague impression is that he got handed the fuzzy end of the dagger by W. Shakespeare, and that historians have long since agreed that the Scottish play is a travesty of the truth. But since that's the only way most people have heard of him, I think tourism would be better served by playing up his dark renown. Scottish history has so few villains, after all. Plenty of bad guys, of course, but their crimes scarcely rise to Shakespearean villainy.

Summer Edinburgh's being crawling with guided tours around spooky places associated with witchcraft, ghosts, murders and hangings, I've been idly thinking there's a market gap for 'Snuff Tours' - guided jaunts around the haunts of Smith, Hume, Millar, Hutton and other great minds of the Enlightenment. Daylight hours only.

Customized tourism has always been with us to some degree, but there is certainly more opportunity to exploit it in an era of The More You Got, the More Pointlessly You Gotta Spend it. Those Americans who can still afford to visit Britain would probably drop a tenner at Highgate to widdle on Marx's grave. Additional income could be raised by selling American lager on the run-up.

I'm wrong on Party. You're right on target, tourismwise. "Marking this 1,000th anniversary would both boost understanding of this historic period and increase awareness, especially among tourists, of locations such as Lumphanan that have ties with Macbeth." Get your Moving Wood twigs here! No, dammit, they have nothing to do with Ents...

Macbeth gets politicians' backing
Shakespeare unfairly portrayed Macbeth as an unsuccessful king in the play of the same name, according to an MSP.
Scottish Tory list MSP Alex Johnstone has tabled a motion on the 1,000th anniversary of Macbeth's birth, who was king of Scotland from 1040 to 1057. The motion "regrets that Macbeth is misportrayed when he was a successful Scottish king"....

John M. Ford:

It's historically inevitable!

"It was not Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy that most impressed me. It was the author's ability to go so long on so little sleep. Karl Marx had a large family that consumed most of his day. He worked at night and often until dawn. Those overnighters were sustained not with caffeine, but beer. Since alcohol is a depressant, I never considered feasible the Marxian prescription for sleep deprivation."Karl Marx's Beer

As I understand it, PG&E led the cheerleading squad for the absurd partial deregulation that set them up perfectly to be fleeced by the likes of Enron. Basically, they still had a cap on what they could charge ratepayers for electricity, but there was no such regulation for suppliers.

During the crisis, it was still cheaper for me to run my electric space heaters instead of the absurd gas wall heater I had in my apartment.

Unfortunately, it's not like the executives at PG&E got hurt - it was the CA taxpayer and lots of ordinary PG&E employees who took it on the chin.

Just dropping a fast comment on the flyby that I hope people will explicate for themselves.

Things like Scottish Play v Real Macbeth, and Richard III's stage & historical records connects up with things like Teresa's comments at Common fraud (December 03, 2004) and various discussions here and over there about how just ignoring facts & truth, and repeating what you want people to believe will often eventually pound itself into the local unconscious as 'common sense' or accepted, unquestioned belief.
Also connects with the technique of The Big Lie, and what I'm coming to believe is a defining part of humanity; what I think is called story or narrative or plot. Just throw random images down, and people will start to make up connexions & stories. (Possibly something to do with our development of a sense of time, causality, logic & so forth in pre-human days.)
Is another reason for disliking many attitudes seen in books, films, computer games, and the assumptions they make, which are starting to bleed into people's real decision making. Also connects to feminist attempts to push such unstated assumptions in language out into the light, and sometimes out of it altogether.

LADY MACBETH: Nought's had, all's spent,
Where our desire is got without content:
'Tis safer to be that which we destroy
Than by destruction dwell in doubtful joy;
So then let us place this man in
GAAAAAOOOOLLL!!!